Tell Me a Secret

Posted on August 6, 2016

A while back I heard a TED Radio Hour interview with Frank Warren, founder of Post Secret, the Community Mail Art Project.  Warren founded the project in 2005.  People mail Warren a postcard of their own artistic design that includes a secret that is absolutely true and has never been shared with anyone.  Interestingly enough, new secrets are posted each week on Sundays… a sort of colloquial prayer of confession.  As I’ve read some of the secrets and a little about the project itself, it has left these impressions with me… People have a lot of secrets.  Down deep, they don’t want to keep them; they want to share them but fear rejection.  As human creatures, we invest a great deal of energy into hiding those parts of ourselves that we think others would reject or judge as immoral, weak, ineffective, inappropriate, or just plain strange.  One of the secrets Warren shared came from a woman who wrote that she still had saved on her phone the last voice mail ever received from her dead grandmother.  Just before grandma died unexpectedly, she had called to wish her granddaughter a happy birthday.  She sang a silly little song she made up.  The granddaughter was embarrassed that she couldn’t bring herself to delete the message.  As a pastor, can I just tell you how common that is?

If there is one thing I’ve learned in 22 years of ministry it is that people in churches are often just as reluctant to share our secrets with one another as is the general public; sometimes more so.  Shame is a powerful thing and a destructive thing.  Yet church, more than anywhere else, should be a place where we can be honest about who we are; a place where we can be honest about what we struggle with and be an encouragement and support to one another.  God never intended for us to go it alone.  It’s not how God built us.  In Genesis, chapter 2, after God creates the man and places him in the garden, God evaluates: “It is not good that the human should be alone;  I will make him a helper as his partner.” (Genesis 2:18)  It’s a shame that scripture is often restricted to wedding ceremonies because it has a broader, deeper meaning: as human creatures we were designed with an innate need for one another’s help and support.

In the month of August, I’ll be preaching a sermon series called “Tell Me a Secret.”  I’ll be examining four “types” of secrets that are also struggles faced by bible characters.  I’m not so sure it really does much good to share our deepest, darkest fears, misgivings, doubts, and shortcomings through an anonymous postcard.  But I feel pretty confident that Christian communities are places where people should be able to open up to one another and be who they are and that – if we can do that with integrity and grace – we’ll really become the help to one another that God intended us to be from the very beginning, the genesis of time.